


He Smiles

by Eavenne



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Angst, F/M, Historical Hetalia, Melancholy, Subtext
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-21 04:42:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15549843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eavenne/pseuds/Eavenne
Summary: They meet, and talk, and miss each other by the slightest of margins. They move apart.And lose each other again.





	He Smiles

He smiles. 

The blood is sticky on her hands. She looks up at him wide-eyed.

His smile broadens. He tilts his head and extends an arm, flexes a white hand and looks at her with a deep, swelling understanding. 

“Oh, Vietnam,” he says. His voice is a light murmur – in an instant it vanishes, for the wind has snatched it away. He’s a white flower torn from a branch, a piece of snow in the jungle. He’s a little circle of winter.

“You will make a great ally.”

\---

He smiles.

She wonders why he smiles. She wonders how he can smile. Sometimes she holds her breath and stops in her tracks, and listens intently for the crunch of the leaves under his thick army boots. It reminds her that he isn’t dead.

But he isn’t really alive, either. His skin is too cold and his smile is too wide and his eyes are too bright, and his laugh flutters in his throat, light as birdsong and just as incomprehensible. She thinks that it doesn’t mean anything at all. 

The AK-47 lies heavy in her hands. 

He carries it with ease, though. It doesn’t seem to weigh much to him, and she supposes he’s seen his fair share of war as well. She wonders if it’s left a mark on him. 

The deepest wounds are always invisible, after all.

\---

He smiles.

“I want to live in a warm place with sunflowers,” he says, and she shakes her head and tells him that it’s nothing to dream of. 

The enemy will always be lying in wait. The enemy won’t let them live in peace, for he will always be watching and calculating and thinking, turning thoughts over and over in his mind and waiting for the right moment to strike. It’s always been like that, and it always will, and as the years drag on the enemy’s face will morph and twist and become fresh and new, but the fight will continue. The fight will never end. The enemy will always return.

And that’s why they have to stick together.

He smiles.

“Even our enemies will become my friends. Everyone will be my friend. Everyone will love me.” He turns to look at her, his eyes wide, seeing everything and comprehending nothing at all. “Do you love me, Vietnam?”

She springs away. She’s heard those words so many times, over so many years, repeated again and again and snaking their way into her ears with memories of France with his silken gloves and the loss of her liberty –

“No.”

War is the enemy of love, after all.

\---

He smiles.

“We won,” he says. 

She glances at the photos of the Americans escaping in a helicopter, and doesn’t feel a thing. The pain that she’s been feeling for years, the pain of being ripped in half against her will – it’s gone now, and there’s nothing to replace it. 

She tries to smile, but her face is stiff. It won’t cooperate.

“I’m happy,” she says. 

“I am happy for you too.”

\---

Little by little, they become friends.

She’s the world’s unwanted child, the pariah of Southeast Asia. When she looks at Thailand and Philippines and Malaysia they narrow their eyes in suspicion, and so she turns away. Her family doesn’t want her. Nobody wants her.

He’s the only one left. “I heard that you invaded Cambodia,” he says over the phone one day, his tone unmistakably casual. “I am curious. Why did you do that?”

“They were killing my people.” 

A pause. 

“I have your back,” he says. It’s all that she needs to hear. 

And she can almost see the smile on his face – it’s there, rosy in a red-carpeted room, deep in winter-cold Moscow.

\---

He leaves, eventually.

For they are oceans apart, and not even the deepest of feelings can escape the guillotine of convenience. When it is difficult to care, he stops caring. When it is difficult to love, he stops loving.

It’s alright, she thinks. Everyone is fickle in war, for death is the enemy of loyalty. Besides, he’s already done so much. It’s a miracle that he hadn’t deserted her sooner.

It doesn’t hurt. Nothing can touch her now, for she is hollow and her head resounds with echoes of the past. She has nothing left to lose.

He’s never been hers to lose, anyway.

\---

He smiles.

That’s all he does nowadays – smile and wave. Sometimes they pass each other in the hallway, or see the flash of a familiar face in the middle of a crowd. Sometimes their eyes meet. 

One second, maybe two. Nothing more.

He smiles.

She nods.

And they walk away.

**Author's Note:**

> Historical notes:
> 
> The fic begins during the Vietnam War. If you didn’t know, what basically happened was that the Vietnamese, after WW2, kicked out their French colonisers, but ended up settling for an agreement that divided Vietnam in half. North Vietnam was home to the revolutionary, communist Ho Chi Minh AKA the guy who kicked the French out, and South Vietnam was formed by the puppet government put up by the French. The US (who had been funding France’s attempts to recolonize Vietnam) promptly deepened their involvement in the South due to anti-communist Cold War sentiments, and, as the South’s sponsor, allowed the South to ignore Northern calls for the reunification elections that were agreed to take place.
> 
> In response, North Vietnam invaded the South, and thus started the Vietnam War.
> 
> At the time, the USSR (and thus Russia) were allied with the North Vietnamese, and provided them with weapons and supplies and such (and they might have helped train them as well). They were the ones who supplied North Vietnam with AK-47s.
> 
> As for what Vietnam says about “the enemy” and how it will always be there, it’s a reference to how Vietnam has truly been fighting off invaders for much of its life – from China in older times, to the French who colonised it, to the Japanese when they joined the French against the Vietnamese in WW2, to the French (again) after WW2, to the Americans, of course, during the Vietnam War. 
> 
> The reference to France is a nod to the fact that France colonised Vietnam. The “loss of her liberty” literally just means that (it’s also an ironic comment on the ideals of the French Revolution), so don’t read too deeply into it. 
> 
> Vietnam was, in many ways, the pariah of Southeast Asia at the time. It got to the point that anti-communist sentiments were part of the cause of the creation of ASEAN. Obviously, everyone avoided Vietnam like the plague after it invaded Cambodia (which Vietnam did out of anger at Cambodian attacks as well as some cultural superiority), so Vietnam became even more of an outsider, if that's possible.
> 
> The USSR backed Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia, but eventually pulled out when it became too much of a strain on their finances (China, though nearer, wasn’t on great terms with Vietnam). This, if I remember correctly, forced Vietnam to leave Cambodia and liberalise in order for it to get sanctions lifted on itself, and ultimately kinda helped it out in the end. 
> 
> So ye! That’s all the historical references in this fic. I hope you enjoyed it!


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